HARLAN COUNTY, USA / AMERICAN DREAM

ABOUT THE FILMS:

HARLAN COUNTY, USA, 1976, Dir. Barbara Kopple, 103 Mins, Janus Films, USA

Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award–winning HARLAN COUNTY, USA unflinchingly documents a grueling coal miners’ strike in a small Kentucky town. With unprecedented access, Kopple and her crew captured the miners’ sometimes violent struggles with strikebreakers, local police and company thugs. Featuring a haunting soundtrack—with legendary country and bluegrass artists Hazel Dickens, Merle Travis, Sarah Gunning and Florence Reece—the film is a heartbreaking record of the thirteen-month struggle between a community fighting to survive and a corporation dedicated to the bottom line.

FORMAT: DCP

AMERICAN DREAM, 1990, Dir. Barbara Kopple, 98 Mins, Janus Films, USA

Winner of the 1991 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, Barbara Kopple’s AMERICAN DREAM unflinchingly details the explosive 1985–86 labor strike against Hormel Foods in Austin, Minnesota, a city ripped apart in the tumult. Fed up with dangerous plant conditions and drastic wage cuts, Austin’s Local P-9 went against the advice of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union and, with the help of labor activist Ray Rogers’s campaign to damage the meatpacking giant’s public reputation, conducted a nearly yearlong walkout. But as the strike dragged on, some workers found themselves desperate to make ends meet and ready to cross the picket line, dividing a community already betrayed by a once progressive company and roiled by blockades, riots and the intervention of the National Guard. Following up her landmark documentary HARLAN COUNTY, USA with another engrossing report from the trenches of working-class America, Kopple poignantly captures the human and political costs of one of the most significant setbacks to organized labor amid the unchecked corporatism of the Reaganomics era.

FORMAT: DCP